7 Tips for Dealing With Anxiety While On the Job

Many people develop Anxiety Disorders as result of stressful work conditions. Toxic work environments or stressful tasks can create chronic stress and cause long-term physical and mental health issues for people. Anxiety on the job is a reality that we all face.

These seven tips will help you to be more empowered and proactive about managing the stress and anxiety you face on the job and in your life.

Check out these stress-free strategies to stay in control of anxiety while at work.

How to Conquer Anxiety on the Job

1. Get A “Life Wellness Plan”

Without a “life wellness plan” your chances of dealing with anxiety on the job are pretty much zero.

Your personal life wellness plan is the foundation from which you build and maintain both your physical and mental strength. A wellness plan strengthens your resilience, which is key to you successfully managing the disruptive and stressful situations in work and personal life.

How you manage your physical and mental wellbeing is entirely up to you. Work out what physical activities you enjoy, then commit to doing them on a regular basis.

Social interaction is also important to your mental wellbeing and it takes effort and commitment to sustain positive healthy relationships in your life. Put in the time to be involved and engaged in the positive aspects of your life. These relationships will be key to helping you get through the tough times in your work and personal life.

2. Take Action Early

“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” – Dale Carnegie

The more resilient you are, the more in tune you will be to things that are not right in your life. Anxiety and stress builds up over time. Your body and your intuition will let your know at the start of a “toxic” situation that it is not right. The key thing for you to do is to recognize the warning signs early and take action.

Taking action right at the start is the best way to ensure that anxiety and stress will not take over your life.

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Taking no action results in you dealing with anxiety that will flow into your personal life and eventually paralyse you.

I know from my own experiences that taking action straight away is not always that easy to do. After one of many bad experiences with a toxic manager, I suffered an anxiety attack while driving home. It really frightened me, and I decided that I had enough. I needed to get control back into my life; but first, I had to figure out exactly how I was going to do that – which leads into the next tip.

3. Find Simple Action Strategies

Knowing what action to take (and when to take action) to avoid stress is part of your journey of learning about yourself.

As humans our natural desire is to avoid pain, and that includes painful emotions. Pushing away our painful emotions by using alcohol or drugs may work for short period of time however “what we resist will persist”.

The more self aware you are, the more conscious you are of your emotions and feelings. I would love to give you the perfect solution on how to handle anxiety and stress in your own life. However, this is something that you have to figure out for yourself. The great thing is that there are so many resources available; all you have to do is find the resources that resonate with you and will help you find your courage to take action with confidence and power.

For me, Bryon Katie’s The Work was by far the best starting point as to helping me change my mindset and thoughts around my anxiety and stress.

The Work provides you with four questions that you apply to each stressful/anxious feeling or thought. It took a lot of practice, but over time the four questions have become ingrained into my thinking. Now when facing challenging situations in my life I find that by applying the four questions, I am able to deal with my emotions and feelings far more effectively.

Once I have the right mindset in place, I am able to progress forward and successfully manage the stressful situation facing me. If you’re interested in whether these four questions might help you, do check out this method.

I also liked Bruce Di Marsico’s The Option Method. This model has five questions that also help you interpret the feelings of anxiety, stress and unhappiness in your life in a more positive and energized way.

Both offer strategies that empower you to change the way you think about your stress and anxiety.

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Your thoughts control your actions.

With a more positive mindset you are more empowered to manage the stress and anxiety in your work and in your life.

4. Recognize Causes of Anxiety

There is no way you can escape the challenges and fast pace of change in the 21st century work place.

The term “disruptive technology” is now used to explain the influence and impact that new technology has in the work environment. To successfully manage this change, organizations need to be agile, flexible and adaptive.

The work environment is increasingly more competitive and the rules keep changing. Job losses are now expected in one’s career and loyalty to a company no longer exists, nor is it expected.

Along with this disruption the feelings of uncertainty and fear start to dominate peoples lives. You will know when these negative feelings are in your workplace because people’s behavior towards each other will not be pleasant or respectful.

These negative behaviours and feelings create what is known as a “toxic workplace”. The stress and anxiety that comes from working in a “toxic workplace” can be debilitating. If you do not address these difficult and painful situations early you will find that you will be sucked into a “vortex” of unhappiness and despair.

This is why it is so important that know what your anxiety triggers are. What events, thoughts and feelings can set you off? Are you afraid of change? Do you find it difficult to leave work at work? Do you feel that you have to put in 150% more than anyone else? Do you find it difficult to speak your mind or ask questions? Are you afraid you will lose your job?

It is also important to recognize the “physical signs” of stress and anxiety. Your body will let you know – if your heart starts pumping, sweaty palms, shortness of breath or you feel like you are crazy for no reason. These are definite signs that you are under stress and anxiety is setting in. It is time to take action.

Knowing what your anxiety triggers are is one huge step toward you proactively dealing with the anxiety and stressful situations you face at work.

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5. Stay Connected

Keep your support networks close to you. Let them know what is going on in your life and ask them for help.

The feelings associated with anxiety and stress can sabotage your life if you do not deal with them. You will find that by not addressing these stressful situations can result in you becoming more withdrawn from the people who support and love you.

Focus on building positive relationships where you feel engaged energized and motivated. At times of high stress anxiety will creep in and it is at these times that you need to be surrounded by positive and supportive people. It is these people that you share your feelings and your fears about challenging situations you are facing.

6. Regularly Disconnect

There is a time and a place for work, and there is a time and a place for relaxation and rest. Take time out to reflect and rest. Make it a rule not to bring work home or discuss with friends and family how much work you have to do.

Thinking about work and how much you have to do means that you are not being “Present”. You are not engaging in the relationships that are important to you. You are not giving yourself time to rest and relax. The anxiety will start to build up when you can’t stop thinking about work.

Allocate a weekend every once in a while where you disconnect from any form of technology: o internet, no phone (unless emergencies) no Facebook, no Twitter, no digital newspapers, etc. Instead, read a book, watch the sunrise or the sunset. Go for walks or go the beach.

Be disconnected for a few days to reconnect with yourself.

7. Focus On The Positive

When facing stressful work situations, it can be really hard to get up every day and go to work feeling happy. When you are tired, anxious and fearful it’s difficult to bring yourself out of a place of despair to one of positivity and joy.

For example, you may have followed all of the previous six tips, are generally a positive and upbeat person, but this one situation/or person at work is just too much. You feel anxiety creeping in.

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Take some time out, sit down, and write a list of all the positive things in your life.

What are your successes? What are your strengths?

Go back to when you were a child and list all the wonderful things you did and loved about your life – your dreams, your hopes, your best childhood friends and all the fun adventures you use to have.

There are negative situations in our lives where we find that we have no influence on changing the outcome. The one person you do have control over however is you.

You have the “Power to Choose” how your respond. You can choose to change your mindset.

You can choose how you deal with your feelings of anxiety and stress. Dealing with anxiety on the job is really down to you choosing how you want to respond to these feelings.

Face Anxiety Head On

Dealing with feelings of anxiety on the job isn’t just something you have to deal with while at work. These feelings will slowly creep into your personal life as well. Practicing these tips above on a regular basis will help you to rediscover your power of choice, your resilience and your courage to successfully deal with feelings of anxiety not only at work, but also in your personal life.

Overcoming anxiety at work and in your life is difficult, but not impossible, to do. Your mindset and how you choose to deal with your feelings of anxiety is very much up to you. Hopefully these seven tips will help you to make the changes to become the empowered and courageous person you were born to be.

Table of Contents

What Determines a Person’s Potential?

A person’s potential is determined by several factors: Physical Security, Emotional Security, Environment and Mindset.

Physical Security

Before we can even strive to fulfill our potential, our basic physical needs must be met. Without adequate food, water and shelter, our days must be spent acquiring these basic needs in order to survive.

You can think of it this way, the person with the potential to become the most brilliant computer programmer ever could be living right now with a nomadic tribe in sub-Saharan Africa. But because they must spend their days meeting these basic physical needs, that potential will remain untapped.

Emotional Security

Humans are social animals, we don’t do well in isolation. Studies have shown that forming intimate bonds with others is incredibly important for our mental health. These bonds start to develop in infancy, babies rely on this bond with a parent or caretaker to fulfill their needs, and if the bond is missing for some reason it can have lifelong psychological consequences.

Environment

Your environment is another important factor that shapes how you achieve your full potential.

Just like the computer programmer in the previous example. You could have the potential to be the greatest composer since Beethoven, but if you had no access to music or you came from a family that didn’t value that skill set, it’s unlikely that you would fulfill your potential in that area.

Mindset

For most of us, we don’t have to worry about getting enough food, water or shelter. Both our physical and emotional needs have been met (to a large extent anyway). And any limits that our environment has imposed are minimal (especially with the availability of the internet).

So for most of us, the main thing that is limiting us from reaching our full potential is our mindset. Our mindset is the story we carry around with us in our head. It starts to develop in childhood and can be with us our entire life.

The Key to Reaching Your Full Potential: Your Mindset

The problem with most people’s mindset is that it’s negative and limiting. The good news is that you can change your mindset. Author Carol Dweck in her best selling book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success points out that there are two types of mindsets: fixed and growth.

A Fixed Mindset

A fixed mindset is one where you have concrete beliefs about yourself. Someone with a fixed mindset came up with “their story” in childhood and it hasn’t changes much over the years. They may believe that they aren’t good at public speaking, math or writing just because they struggled with those subjects in school.

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So when something goes wrong, a common thought for someone with a fixed mindset is “What an idiot, I knew I wasn’t any good at that.” Or “Well that just confirmed what I already knew, I won’t be doing that again”. Having a fixed mindset just reinforces negative thoughts and attitudes, making it harder to reach your full potential.

A Growth Mindset

A growth mindset, on the other hand, is exactly the opposite. With a growth mindset, you believe anything is possible (but don’t confuse this with being delusional! As a 5’10” 54 year old I’m not going to play in the NBA!). It’s more of the way you think about and approach problems.

Let’s go back to the issue of not being good at public speaking, when things go wrong, instead of telling yourself that you have never been good at public speaking and never will be. A person with a growth mindset will analyze what went wrong and come up with solutions to make it better next time.

For instance, they may take a class on public speaking at their local community college, or join the Toastmaster’s organization. Whatever it is, they don’t look at failure as an insurmountable roadblock, rather a minor detour on the road to their destination.

How to Live up to Your Full Potential and Succeed in Life

1. Develop a Goal

When setting goals, it’s important to keep in mind three things:

First, they should be specific and not vague. So instead of saying “I want to live up to my full potential in life”, a more specific goal would be “I want to become the best (salesman, artist, internet marketer) that I can be.” This is a much more specific goal.

Second, your goal should be measurable. In other words, you should be able to measure your progress towards the goal. Again, it’s much easier to measure your progress to becoming the best artist you can be than it is trying to measure your progress at living up to your “full potential”.

Finally, a goal must be written down. This takes the goal out of the realm of wishful thinking and makes it more real. It also can serve as motivation if you post your goal where you will see it. Put it on your desk, or next to your computer just to remind yourself to keep moving forward. In short, a goal that isn’t written down is just a wish.

2. Understand That Achieving Your Goal Is Often Times a By-Product of What You Are Doing

Let’s say that your goal is to become the best writer you can be. You may want to measure your success by your ability to get published or in the case of blogging, how widely read your articles are.

Instead of constantly worrying about reaching your goal to be the best, your time is much better spent just writing. As with anything, the more you do it, the better you’ll get.

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It’s the same with any goal, it’s important to set them, but achieving your goal of becoming the best salesperson is really just the by-product of you getting out there and selling!

3. Don’t Let Popular Opinion Dissuade You

Have you ever heard of the Bannister Effect? For years, it was considered a law of nature that the human body was incapable of running a mile in less than 4 minutes. That was until May 6, 1954 when Roger Bannister ran a mile in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds. He did what was long considered impossible, but it turned out that it was only impossible because people believed it was impossible.

Roger Bannister didn’t let popular opinion stand in his way, and after he proved that the 4 minute mile was only a psychological barrier, others have continued to break records. Today the current record holder is Hicham El Guerrouj with a time of 3 minutes 43.13 seconds!

4. Don’t Be Afraid to Push the Envelope

Almost by definition, living up to your full potential requires you to step outside your comfort zone and expand your boundaries.

Average people do average things, get average results and live average lives. Extraordinary people do extraordinary things, get extraordinary results and live extraordinary lives.

5. Practice Discipline

Admittedly, this comes easier for some people than others, but it’s a skill that you can develop and will serve you well in all aspects of your life.

Another way of thinking about discipline is just delayed gratification. How many times have you been on a diet, but there’s a piece of cheese cake in the refrigerator calling out your name!

Having discipline is not a matter of not wanting the cheese cake, discipline is acknowledging your desire for the cheese cake but realizing that this craving is only temporary, and once it passes, you will be much happier that we didn’t succumb to a temporary urge.

The bottom line here is that while you may want to stop working at 5pm sharp, or watch the game on Saturday, but by developing the discipline to delay satisfaction you will be pushing your boundaries and reaping the rewards that come from that extra effort.

6. Be Confident

Have you ever dealt with someone who was new at their job and lacked confidence? Maybe it was a salesperson who couldn’t answer basic questions about a product or just gave you flat out wrong information. Did you end up buying from that salesperson?

My guess is no, I sure wouldn’t.

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Confidence comes with knowledge, discipline and experience. But how do you develop confidence if you are just starting out like our intrepid salesperson? While experience comes with time, knowledge can be acquired fairly quickly, especially if you have already mastered the art of self discipline!

A good rule of thumb is to always start with knowledge. Learn as much as you can, take classes, get a mentor or just do research. If you are disciplined enough to develop the knowledge it will make getting the experience much easier.

7. Accept That You Will Fail

There is no such thing as an overnight success. Failure is a part of life and it happens to everyone. In fact, there is a whole body of thinking that failure is actually better than success: 6 Reasons It’s Okay To Fail

While most of us would agree that success is better than failure, when it does happen, here are some thing to keep in mind:

Don’t take it personally. A failure in a job, career, business or marriage is just that. It is not reflection on you as a person. I had a friend who lost his entire fortune (over 20 million dollars) in a business deal. I called him shortly after and as expected he was very depressed. My only advice to him was to:

“Never confuse your self worth with your net worth”.

Move on, failures can be heartbreaking, embarrassing and demoralizing. Take the time needed to go through those feelings and process the emotions. Then, let it go, holding on to negative emotions keeps you stuck in a fixed mindset. Remember that your goal here is to live up to your full potential and succeed in life. Dwelling on past mistakes and failures is the surest way to derail your progress.

Let failure be a learning opportunity. I know it’s a cliche, but it’s a cliche for a reason, it’s true! When I first started internet marketing, I started using Facebook ads for practically everything I did. Pretty soon I found that I was spending about $1,000 on ads that were generating about $200 in income, not a very good business model! I took that failure and redesigned my marketing efforts. I was able to both reduced my costs and increased my sales so that now for every $1,000 in advertising I am generating around $5,000 in income.

8. Learn to Embrace Uncomfortable Situations

Succeeding in life by living up to your full potential means embracing uncomfortable situations. Chris and Heidi Powell, well known personal trainers and hosts of the show Extreme Weight Loss use this technique with their clients. It works like this:

They set a goal for their client that the client thinks is just out of reach. Then through encouragement and motivation, they help the client work though the uncomfortableness and pain to achieve the goal.

This technique works for both physical and psychological challenges. Both our bodies and minds are capable of much more that we think they are.

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9. Set Small Goals to Achieve Big Results

When you are first setting goals, don’t be afraid to make them big! “I want to be the #1 salesperson in the company” or “I want to be a successful artist”. But once you have those goals set, you then need an action plan to get there. It’s in this action plan that you should set many small, easily attainable goals.

For the salesperson, it might be to increase the number of sales they make by one a week in the next quarter, two a week for the 2nd quarter etc… For the artist, it might be to master a technique before the next art show, or produce X number of works to sell at the art show.

Whatever the goals are, they need to get you closer to your ultimate goal while at the same time be attainable. Success builds on success, so achieving these small goals helps to motivate you to continue on to your bigger goals.

10. Take Time to Recharge

Everyone needs “down time”, trying to do everything yourself, all at once is a recipe for disaster.

We talked a lot about being motivated and disciplined in this article; while they are essential to living up to your full potential and succeeding in life, having adequate down time is just as important.

Any personal trainer will tell you that to get the most out of your workouts, you need to take 1 to 2 days off a week. This gives your body a chance to recover and actually get stronger.

The same is true when we are trying to expand our boundaries and fulfill our potential. Making sure we have adequate down time prevents fatigue anxiety and poor decision making.

Final Thoughts

The success you’ll find from living life to your full potential is its own reward. One day, we all will look back on our lives and and think “I wish I would have done …”, “I had a chance to to be a … but I was to scared”, “I could have been a great … if I had put the time in.”

I hope that in this article, we have given you both the motivation and tools to push yourself to your full potential in life, so that when you look back one day your regrets will be few.